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s Kitten

with Josh and Isaiah

I don’t know about you, my
friends-across-the-globe, but my house began preparing for
Valentines Day around, oh, the middle of January. For whatever
reason, it’s one of my daughters’ favorite holidays;
I’d like to think it’s because of their passionate love
for their fellow men, but I suspect it has more to do with the
abundance of chocolate being handed out. For a household that shops
pretty exclusively at farmers’ markets and Whole Foods, the
glut of Hershey kisses and Sweethearts falling from the sky must
seem not unlike manna from heaven all those thousands of years ago,
and Valentines Day rivals only Halloween in its possibility –
nay, promise – of high fructose corn syrup for everyone.

To be fair, my daughters have just as much fun preparing and giving
gifts as they do receiving them, and they’ve been painting
and drawing and writing and crafting lo these many weeks now. And I
try hard to act like most other moms and not wrinkle my nose at the
Sweet Tarts or the weird-tasting little hearts with words on them,
because I don’t want my kids to be complete outcasts at such
a young age.

Ok, so that’s probably not the most
flattering title, but it’s the best I could come up with.
Hopefully you know what I mean. I’m not talking about giving
gifts to people you don’t really care about – those are
gifts, to me, best left un-given, money and energy better directed
elsewhere. But that’s a blog for another day.

No, when I talk about peripheral gift-giving, I mean all the people
in your life that you want to recognize and honor in some small
way, but that you may not know well enough to come up with a truly
personal gift. I’m thinking of preschool teachers, Sunday
school volunteers, soccer coaches or ballet teachers, even mothers
you don’t know well in your large mom’s group.
I’ve polled (very unscientifically) several friends of mine
who are teachers, and found out what they like and what
doesn’t work so well.

It seems that clothing designers have
finally figured out that moms can still be cool and funny; for the
past few years I’ve seen a rush of clever slogan t-shirts
aimed at mothers, and have even reviewed a few of my favorites. But
as the market has become saturated, I’ve been turning down
requests to review new products; there simply didn’t seem
anything new out there except more whiney t-shirts hinting at
overburdened, underappreciated mothers, and I couldn’t find a
reason to encourage you to buy them.

A few weeks ago, though, I stumbled across a new line called Mamaisms, and I liked it so much I actually
wrote to them and asked if I could review their shirts. Their
slogan, “Mamaisms: Because the World Needs A Dose Of Common
Sense” resonates with me, the shirts are good quality, and
more important, they put their money where their mouth is.

I’m always on the lookout for ways
to indulge myself without ingesting either 1) calories or 2)
chemicals of dubious healthfulness (also known as artificial
sweeteners). I recently stumbled across a real winner.

Metromint is a relatively new line of
flavored water that is, as you can guess, variations on mint. Most
flavored waters will have the aforementioned artificial sweeteners,
or at least a modicum of calories, in them, with my favorite Hint Water
being a notable exception. But I’ve not found any that
channel my favorite flavor – chocolate.

As I explained yesterday, I’ve
discovered a gaping hole in the chocolate world – an
unexplored area, if you will. Specifically, no one had really
delved into the world of chocolate from the point of view of a
pregnant or post-partum mommy.

As we all know, we’ve got specific cravings and wants when
the hormones are raging. So I made it my mission to find the best
of the best from small chocolatiers all across the country. For
more details on my criteria and how I narrowed the final list down,
see yesterday’s blog. But for now, let’s get to the
chocolate.